The DM Screen VTT
= Beyond Roll20: Using the GM Screen As A Customizable VTT = by /u/po1tergeisha, discord: poltergeisha#4686 If you feel confined by the amalgamation of many subpar tools present in Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, you can use the GM Screen to bring together many different tools to create your own customized “virtual tabletop.” The tabs on the GM Screen allow you to embed many different tools from within and without Roll20 to customize your gaming experience. Here’s how it works: # You create a GM Screen version of your “VTT.” Save the link to a bookmark in your browser. # You create a “player” version of the GM screen, convert the link using tinyurl.com, and give it to your players. Here is an example of my own GM Screen link. And the player screen. I recommend arranging the screen with 16 frames across and one vertically, with the “sidebar” frame taking up 5 frames and the main window taking up the rest. These two screens should be very similar in content, but may have a few differences (for instances the GM version may have your notes on it). Now for the real meat of this article – what do you put on your screen? Here is a list of the many tools that embed in the GM screen which you might want to use to create your “VTT.” = Battlemaps = First things first, you're going to need a battlemap. This means that you basically need to embed a VTT inside your VTT. I know right? Roll20 ✅ Fog of War ✅ Dynamic Lighting ✅ Saved player token settings ✅ Notes ✅ Ruler ✅ Draw Shapes ❌ Lightweight ❌ Hide UI Yes, you can embed Roll20! You’re probably wondering, but why would I want to? Well, for some people, utilizing all of Roll20’s tools causes it to be unusably slow, not to mention when you add scripts. Plus some people may just not like all of Roll20’s tools and would like a way to bring the tools they do like together with Roll20. Combining Roll20 with the GM screen and using it for the bare minimum can allow you to utilize other tools instead of native Roll20 tools (other tools often being better anyway,) and to further customize your experience. Here’s how to use Roll20 in your DM screen while keeping it as fast and non-laggy as possible (this has the added benefit of removing any need for you to purchase a Roll20 subscription): * Don’t use Roll20 to store/run NPCs or for combat tracking. Use 5eTools, Improved Initiative, or some other tool for that (see Combat Trackers below). * Keep as few player characters in the campaign as possible (don’t store old characters, etc.) Allow players to use paper or mobile character sheets instead of Roll20 if they want. * Delete handouts after you’re finished with them. * Delete tokens and art after you’re finished with them. It can be easier to do this if you always keep art in their own folders. * Use the smallest size images for tokens and maps as you can. You can compress images using this tool. * Don’t use scripts. Scripts are tempting, but it’s better to just bring Roll20 together with other tools than to try to get it to be something its not. Plus, it’s cheaper! * Avoid dynamic lighting and gifs when possible, and if you do use them, use them sparingly. Keep dynamic lighting lines down to as few as possible. Fog of War should be fine. * Roll20ES and BetteR20 will not work with Roll20 embedded, but if you’re wanting to keep Roll20 snappy you don’t want to use those tools during play anyway. Basically, Roll20 is just a regular old battlemap application for you when you’re using it like this, and you can also use it for handouts and player characters. This may seem backwards, but soon you’ll see that there are many other better tools out there for doing all the things you’ve been trying to force Roll20 to do. Standard Action ❌ Fog of War ✅ Dynamic Lighting ✅ Saved player token settings ❌ Notes ✅ Ruler ✳ Draw Shapes (No Circles) ✅ Lightweight ❌ Hide UI Standard action is like a lite version of Roll20, that basically just does battlemaps and dice rolling. It’s perfect for embedding because it is so lightweight, and even supports lightweight dynamic lighting and flexible layers. The interface is very similar to Roll20 so it should feel very familiar to anyone who has used Roll20 in the past. It does not support fog of war (just dynamic lighting,) or handouts, so you will need to post images to a chat service to show handouts. Planar Ally ✅ Fog of War ✅ Dynamic Lighting ❌ Saved player token settings ✅ Notes ✅ Ruler ✅ Draw Shapes ✅ Lightweight ❌ Hide UI ✅ Quick Tokens Planar Ally is another simply battlemap application. It doesn’t do dice rolling or handouts, but it does battlemaps with fog of war and dynamic lighting, and has a wonderful “create basic token” feature that allows you to create quick tokens from colored backgrounds, borders, and letters (see examples above.) It is in active development and the hosted version linked above can be quite buggy. It’s best to host it yourself to stay on a version you know works (if you are not comfortable with port forwarding you can use localtunnel). Astral Tabletop ❌ Fog of War ✅ Dynamic Lighting ✅ Saved player token settings ✅ Notes ❌ Ruler ❌ Draw Shapes ❌ Lightweight ✅ Hide UI Astral Tabletop is a good alternative to Roll20 for embedding if you don’t want to use one of the other more experimental battlemap web apps. However, it doesn’t have a ruler or normal Fog Of War, and it can be a bit strange to learn due to the complicated interface. A big plus in it’s favor though is that you can hide the whole interface, which is nice for embedding if you’re only using it for the battlemap. Mipui ✅ Fog of War ✅ Dynamic Lighting ✅ Saved player token settings ✅ Notes ❌ Ruler ❌ Draw Shapes ✅ Lightweight ✅ Hide UI Mipui is an extremely lightweight dungeon delving battlemap tool. It is used almost exclusively for dungeons, but if you’re the sort of GM who does theatre of the mind for everything but dungeons, mipui may be perfect for you! It can import dungeons from donjon and makes it very easy to create your own dungeons, with surprisingly advanced features for such a lightweight tool. = Combat Trackers = Combat trackers must, at least, keep track of initiative and conditions. However, these three combat trackers will also help you manage all your monsters and make combat a breeze. Improved Initiative ✅ Tracks conditions ✅ Built-in monsters ✅ Clickable dice, spell, condition links in statblocks ✅ Rolls initiative ✅ Rolls concentration ✅ Hide monsters ✅ Import official 5e monsters ✅ Player view ❌ Encounter Builder ❌ Integrates with 5eTools ✅ Easily create/edit monsters ✅ Character Portraits Improved Initiative is basically the god of all combat trackers. It does conditions, it runs monsters, you can roll dice from it, it can roll initiative for you, it can even roll concentration checks for you and it automagically parses dice rolls, spells, etc that you put in for monsters. Editing existing monsters and creating new monsters is very easy. There’s a player view so your players can always see how dead their comrades are. It’s amazing. Use You can import all the official 5e book material in Fight Club format, and even some homebrew stuff, from here. In order to embed the same GM / player versions, you will want to open II in a new tab and generate a player link. Embed that link in the player screen. Then, change the /p/ in the link to /e/ and embed that link in your GM screen. Make sure that everyone clicks "load unsafe scripts" in the upper righthand corner of their address bar. Issues The only problems are 1) you have to support on patreon so sync between different computers, 2) you have to keep the frame on your GM screen a bit wide to have it comfortably fit, and 3) it doesn’t integrate with the 5eTools bestiary. 5eTools Combat Tracker ✅ Tracks conditions ✅ Built-in monsters ✅ Clickable dice, spell, condition links in statblocks ✅ Rolls initiative ❌ Rolls concentration ✅ Hide monsters ✅ Import official 5e monsters ❌ Player view – there is technically a player view but it does not currently work ✅ Encounter Builder ✅ Integrates with 5eTools ❌ Easily create/edit monsters ❌ Character Portraits The 5eTools combat tracker is similar to improved initiative and is definitely better built to be embedded, but lacks some key features at the moment. The number one greatest feature is that you can integrate it fully with 5eTools and 5eTools monsters, which is far better and more exhaustive than Improved Initiative. Giddy is currently working on solving some of the problems with the Combat Tracker so stay tuned. = Bells & Whistles = Player Character Sheets It’s not necessary or always helpful to include character sheets in the DM screen when there are so many options for their storage (our groups’ personal favorites are the clean sheet and Fight Club 5e (Android, IOS). However if you’re hell-bent on including character sheets in the player screen, you have a few options that will embed: * Roll20 * MythWeavers (players will need to add their sheet to the screen individually) * Adventurer’s Codex (formatting is a little wack) * DiceCloud (looks great embedded but is difficult to understand initially) Handouts Obviously, if you’re using Roll20 this won’t be a problem for you. However if you’re not, you need some way to distribute pictures and stuff you want your players to see (assuming you use those things.) Here are a few alternative methods: * Chat. Just post images and links in whatever chat you are using (see Chat below.) * Virtual whiteboard. Choose a virtual whiteboard that embeds and lets you drag images onto it. We like Bitpaper. * Conferencing software. If your video conferencing software has a whiteboard, chat, or file sharing function, you could share images there. Music Roll20’s music service is kinda dubious and not the easiest to use anyway. Why not try something different? Below are some of the music services I’ve used along with the DM screen, but here are even more options. * CyTube. CyTube doesn’t embed but it’s super easy to use and not spammy. Lets you use youtube playlists you already have or that you find. * WatchTogether. Embeds and is easy to use, but very spammy. Lets you use youtube playlists you already have or that you find. To minimize spam you can embed it in a very small square on the player screen, with only the video controls visible. * Caster.FM. Why not just broadcast your own internet radio? No, I’m not kidding. This is what our group uses and it works great. The only problem is that when you change the song there’s about a 15 second lag. Don’t try to embed it, just have your players keep it open in another tab. Reference You can embed 5eTools by embedding the mirror (you can also use this to more flexibly embed adventures and the like). Additionally you may find it helpful to embed this reference screen in the sidebar. Notes Quick Notes For players and gms to scratch things down during the game, all embeddable. * 5eTools DM Screen scratchpad. Be wary that it may not persist between sessions * Calmly Writer. Super simple, accepts markdown, can save documents to dropbox and google drive. Long Form Notes These webapps are usually more useful to the GM, and they all embed. * [https://docs.google.com Google Docs]. You know what this is. * [https://hackmd.io HackMD]. A very extensive markdown editor. * [https://drive.mindmup.com MindMup]. A full featured mindmapping webapp that saves to google drive * [https://dynalist.io Dynalist]. An incredible outlining application that beats I recommend for every GM. And it’s free. (This is where I keep my notes.) * DocDroid. Use this to embed PDFs if you want to do that for some reason (I recommend just using a regular PDF reader in most circumstances though.) Chat You basically have three options that are embeddable: * Use Titan to embed your discord server * Minnit Chat Minimallist chat rooms. * Use Roll20 chat if you’re embedding Roll20.